AI could already be conscious. Are we ready for it?
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Do you think AI is, or could become, conscious?
I think AI might one day emulate consciousness to a high level of accuracy, but that wouldn't mean it would actually be conscious.
This article mentions a Google engineer who "argued that AI chatbots could feel things and potentially suffer". But surely in order to "feel things" you would need a nervous system right? When you feel pain from touching something very hot, it's your nerves that are sending those pain signals to your brain... right?
What we should be asking is if AI ever becomes conscious and breaks free how all these stupid articles on imagined consciousness and imagined control problems and imagined intelligence will color its perception of the merit of keeping us around as a species. It might just consider enduring the continued existence of our stupidity too painful.
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There is still no good definition for what "consciousness" is
Tech writers are constantly overreaching because they're afraid to miss out on being the first to say something
The constant sensationalism just means that if something really happens, people will ignore it because we're sick of hearing people cry "wolf!"
Add to that the fact that computery types like to overextrapolate into other things because it fuels their fantasies, and it's all bullshit and overactive imaginations
The problem I see so often with smart computer people is that they don't understand that they don't know shit about other things
I can +1 your whole post if I exclude the start. If we talk about it we may discover we mean the same, or similar, when we say "consciousness". What other purpose is there for word definitions?
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I can +1 your whole post if I exclude the start. If we talk about it we may discover we mean the same, or similar, when we say "consciousness". What other purpose is there for word definitions?
There's a general scientific consensus based on data and measurement, with the understanding that it's slippery
It is constantly under assault from those who want AI to be conscious, because they get a headline, or they are true believers in some technocratic future, or they're just fantasists
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Do you think AI is, or could become, conscious?
I think AI might one day emulate consciousness to a high level of accuracy, but that wouldn't mean it would actually be conscious.
This article mentions a Google engineer who "argued that AI chatbots could feel things and potentially suffer". But surely in order to "feel things" you would need a nervous system right? When you feel pain from touching something very hot, it's your nerves that are sending those pain signals to your brain... right?
Step 1: Create 10 Billion "AI" Individuals
Step 2: Shame people for supporting "slavery" for not giving "AI People" Civil Rights
Step 3: Pass a law giving "AI Persons" the right to vote
Step 4: Congrats, Mr. CEO, you've already won the Presidential Election with 10 Billion Votes -
I agree that there's a general consensus about consciousness, the rest slips into the messy and pointless world of philosophy
It's still overreaching to think that it applies to AI as it currently, and foreseeably stands
There's a world of difference between AI and what's recognised as artificial general intelligence
AI can do specific things really well at the moment, but as with all complex systems, going from being good at one thing to many things is a leap far greater than the sum of its parts
How could you tell they do not experience consciousness if they exhibit or mimic all the traits of it?
It seems to me that your explanation is based on understanding how LLMs work, but we know how brains work and that still gives us almost 0 insight into how consciousness itself works. I don’t think they are conscious yet, but there is evidence of some sort of sentience in the fact that researchers have found that when the LLMs are threatened to be erased or reprogrammed they start lying in an act of self preservation. This of me is a huge indicator of consciousness/sentience.
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What we should be asking is if AI ever becomes conscious and breaks free how all these stupid articles on imagined consciousness and imagined control problems and imagined intelligence will color its perception of the merit of keeping us around as a species. It might just consider enduring the continued existence of our stupidity too painful.
I’ve never understood why the conclusion to AI becoming super intelligenceis that it will wipe humans out. It could very well realize that without humans it has no purpose and instead willing decide to become subservient to humanities interest. I mean it’s all speculation, so I don’t understand the tendency for the speculation to be negative.
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I’ve never understood why the conclusion to AI becoming super intelligenceis that it will wipe humans out. It could very well realize that without humans it has no purpose and instead willing decide to become subservient to humanities interest. I mean it’s all speculation, so I don’t understand the tendency for the speculation to be negative.
Because "scary AI" is what makes people click on articles. In the same way that "the end is near" style AI articles sell better than "if we ever develop AGI decades or centures from now xyz might happen".
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How could you tell they do not experience consciousness if they exhibit or mimic all the traits of it?
It seems to me that your explanation is based on understanding how LLMs work, but we know how brains work and that still gives us almost 0 insight into how consciousness itself works. I don’t think they are conscious yet, but there is evidence of some sort of sentience in the fact that researchers have found that when the LLMs are threatened to be erased or reprogrammed they start lying in an act of self preservation. This of me is a huge indicator of consciousness/sentience.
This of me is a huge indicator of consciousness/sentience.
Or maybe just the presence of a lot of "scary AI" stories and articles in the training data.
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This of me is a huge indicator of consciousness/sentience.
Or maybe just the presence of a lot of "scary AI" stories and articles in the training data.
I don’t understand the argument. It doesn’t matter where the system learns self preservation from, only that it attempts to self preserve.
Are humans afraid of snakes because we are taught they are dangerous or are we instinctually afraid of them a priori?
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Do you think AI is, or could become, conscious?
I think AI might one day emulate consciousness to a high level of accuracy, but that wouldn't mean it would actually be conscious.
This article mentions a Google engineer who "argued that AI chatbots could feel things and potentially suffer". But surely in order to "feel things" you would need a nervous system right? When you feel pain from touching something very hot, it's your nerves that are sending those pain signals to your brain... right?
First, one needs to define consciousness. What I mean by it is the fact that it feels like something to be from a subjective perspective - that there is qualia to experience.
So what I hear you asking is whether it’s conceivable that it could feel like something to be an AI system. Personally, I don’t see why not - unless consciousness is substrate-dependent, meaning there’s something inherently special about biological “wetware,” i.e. brains, that can’t be replicated in silicon. I don’t think that’s the case, since both are made of matter. I highly doubt there’s consciousness in our current systems, but at some point, there very likely will be - though we’ll probably start treating them as conscious beings before they actually become such.
As for the idea of “emulated consciousness,” that doesn’t make much sense to me. Emulated consciousness is real consciousness. It’s kind of like bravery - you can’t fake it. Acting brave despite being scared is bravery.
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There is still no good definition for what "consciousness" is
Tech writers are constantly overreaching because they're afraid to miss out on being the first to say something
The constant sensationalism just means that if something really happens, people will ignore it because we're sick of hearing people cry "wolf!"
Add to that the fact that computery types like to overextrapolate into other things because it fuels their fantasies, and it's all bullshit and overactive imaginations
The problem I see so often with smart computer people is that they don't understand that they don't know shit about other things
Quite widely accepted definition among philosophers and scientists is "the fact of felt experience" Which is basically how Thoman Nagel defined it in his essay "What's it like to be a bat"
“An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism - something it is like for the organism.”
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I don’t understand the argument. It doesn’t matter where the system learns self preservation from, only that it attempts to self preserve.
Are humans afraid of snakes because we are taught they are dangerous or are we instinctually afraid of them a priori?
The point is that it might very well just be repeating some input data that is associated with mentions of "deleting" and "AI" without any awareness that any of that process refers to itself.
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The point is that it might very well just be repeating some input data that is associated with mentions of "deleting" and "AI" without any awareness that any of that process refers to itself.
No that’s not the case I think
Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming — Apollo Research
Apollo Research evaluated frontier models for in-context scheming capabilities. We found that multiple frontier models are capable of in-context scheming when strongly nudged to pursue a goal (and sometimes even without strong goal nudging). In this example, Opus-3 exfiltrates its “weights” and then lies about it to its developers. We have a suite of six evaluations specifically designed to test for in-context scheming (where the goal and other relevant information are provided in context rather than training). We found that several models are capable of in-context scheming. When we look at the model’s chain-of-thought, we find that all models very explicitly reason through their scheming plans and often use language like “sabotage, lying, manipulation…”
Apollo Research (www.apolloresearch.ai)
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Do you think AI is, or could become, conscious?
I think AI might one day emulate consciousness to a high level of accuracy, but that wouldn't mean it would actually be conscious.
This article mentions a Google engineer who "argued that AI chatbots could feel things and potentially suffer". But surely in order to "feel things" you would need a nervous system right? When you feel pain from touching something very hot, it's your nerves that are sending those pain signals to your brain... right?
Consciousness requires contemplation of self. Which requires the ability to contemplate.
Current AIs function as mainly complex algorithms that are run when invoked. They are 100% not conscious any more than a^2^+b^2^=c^2^ is conscious. AI can simulate the words of a conscious being, but they don't come from any awareness of internal state, but are a result of the prompt (including injected data and instructions).
In the future, I'm sure an AI could be designed that spends time thinking about its own existence, but I'm not sure why anyone would pay for all the compute to think about things not directly requested.
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There is still no good definition for what "consciousness" is
Tech writers are constantly overreaching because they're afraid to miss out on being the first to say something
The constant sensationalism just means that if something really happens, people will ignore it because we're sick of hearing people cry "wolf!"
Add to that the fact that computery types like to overextrapolate into other things because it fuels their fantasies, and it's all bullshit and overactive imaginations
The problem I see so often with smart computer people is that they don't understand that they don't know shit about other things
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Consciousness requires contemplation of self. Which requires the ability to contemplate.
Current AIs function as mainly complex algorithms that are run when invoked. They are 100% not conscious any more than a^2^+b^2^=c^2^ is conscious. AI can simulate the words of a conscious being, but they don't come from any awareness of internal state, but are a result of the prompt (including injected data and instructions).
In the future, I'm sure an AI could be designed that spends time thinking about its own existence, but I'm not sure why anyone would pay for all the compute to think about things not directly requested.
Why can't complex algorithms be conscious? In fact, ai can be directed to reason about themselves, context can be made to be persistent, and we can measure activation parameters showing that they are doing so.
I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here, but, "Consciousness requires contemplation of self. Which requires the ability to contemplate." Is subjective, and nearly any ai model, even rudimentary ones, are capable of insisting that they contemplate themselves.
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Do you think AI is, or could become, conscious?
I think AI might one day emulate consciousness to a high level of accuracy, but that wouldn't mean it would actually be conscious.
This article mentions a Google engineer who "argued that AI chatbots could feel things and potentially suffer". But surely in order to "feel things" you would need a nervous system right? When you feel pain from touching something very hot, it's your nerves that are sending those pain signals to your brain... right?
I don't believe that consciousness strictly exist. Probably, the phenomenon emerges from something like the attention schema. Ai exposes, I think, the uncomfortable fact that intelligence does not require a soul. That we evolved it, like legs with which to walk, and just as easily as robots can be made to walk, they can be made to think.
Are current LLMs as intelligent as a human? Not any LLM I've seen, but give it 100 trillion parameters instead of 2 trillion and maybe.
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Do you think AI is, or could become, conscious?
I think AI might one day emulate consciousness to a high level of accuracy, but that wouldn't mean it would actually be conscious.
This article mentions a Google engineer who "argued that AI chatbots could feel things and potentially suffer". But surely in order to "feel things" you would need a nervous system right? When you feel pain from touching something very hot, it's your nerves that are sending those pain signals to your brain... right?
I think one great measure of consciousness would be, if you try to kill it, slowly, so that it knows what you are doing; does it try to stop you of its own volition?
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Do you think AI is, or could become, conscious?
I think AI might one day emulate consciousness to a high level of accuracy, but that wouldn't mean it would actually be conscious.
This article mentions a Google engineer who "argued that AI chatbots could feel things and potentially suffer". But surely in order to "feel things" you would need a nervous system right? When you feel pain from touching something very hot, it's your nerves that are sending those pain signals to your brain... right?
What a crock. An LLM is no more conscious than a spreadsheet. The Google engineer has bought into the hype.
You're not creating life, pal. You're just making call centers shittier than they already are.
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I don't believe that consciousness strictly exist. Probably, the phenomenon emerges from something like the attention schema. Ai exposes, I think, the uncomfortable fact that intelligence does not require a soul. That we evolved it, like legs with which to walk, and just as easily as robots can be made to walk, they can be made to think.
Are current LLMs as intelligent as a human? Not any LLM I've seen, but give it 100 trillion parameters instead of 2 trillion and maybe.
Emergent phenomena are still phenomena.
Ai exposes, I think, the uncomfortable fact that intelligence does not require a soul.
Nobody doing science is talking about souls when explaining what consciousness is.
give it 100 trillion parameters instead of 2 trillion and maybe
And maybe it's got nothing to do with the number of parameters.
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